Tighten up that nutrition!

In both the three- and six-month plans, eat approximately 20-30% more calories per day than needed for baseline bodyweight management. At the same time, keep carbohydrates relatively low, but high enough to avoid feeling and looking depleted. To prevent bodyfat storage, vary the amount of carbohydrates you take in on a daily basis. We provide you with carbohydrate strategies for the three- and six-month plans, plus two others designed for specific purposes, as well as sample meal plans to put these strategies into practice.

WEEKLY CARBOHYDRATE STRATEGIES

The following weekly strategies create “metabolic confusion,” helping to prevent your body from storing excess calories as bodyfat. Altering carb intake from day to day encourages your body to burn calories and stored bodyfat, rather than increasing fat storage. Your total bodyweight should increase through the addition of muscle mass, not bodyfat.

The number of carbohydrates you should take in to promote growth without accumulating significant amounts of bodyfat is highly individual. As such, these recommendations are averages. They may be ideal for you, or you may need to make adaptations as you see the effects they have on your physique.

SAMPLE MEAL PLANS

These four meal plans offer examples of the types of daily nutrition plans you might put together for your add-mass program. Each meal plan offers a different total carb count per day — from 250-400 g. The goal is to keep close track of the amount of carbs you take in every day, while allowing for all the protein and calories needed for muscular growth.

Each daily meal plan has 3,700-3,900 calories and 320-350 g of protein. our site established these baselines as averages our readers will need for success. If you find that you need to consume fewer or more calories than these meals provide, eat the same foods and the same number of meals, but reduce or increase portion sizes across the board. This will keep your macronutrient ratios the same while allowing you to make the necessary calorie adjustments.

PART 5: DIET STRATEGIES

Good planning and psychological preparation are key to any successful diet. Two factors that can quickly sabotage a bodybuilding diet are missing meals and stressing over missed meals. Follow these tips to avoid those situations.

1 Strictly adhere to your diet at all times Bring as much discipline to your diet as you bring to weight training. Build your days around your nutrition program and follow through.

2 Don’t stress if you miss a meal On occasion, circumstances may cause you to miss a meal or to eat foods that are less than ideal. When that happens, getting stressed out will do much more harm to your physique than the missed meal itself.

3 Prepare for problems Always carry a few ready-to-eat meals in a cooler. You never know when you might be delayed at work or school.

4 Eat more food earlier in the day If you have concerns that you won’t be able to consume all the meals and quantities of foods that your diet calls for, use early meals to make up the difference. Add a third morning meal or eat slightly more food at your first two meals of the day.

5 Keep carbs moderate Once you’ve established your daily. plan, watch your carb intake to make certain that you are taking in the proper amount for that day. Eating too few carbs will dramatically undercut your ability to add muscle mass. Eating too many will add more bodyfat than you want.

6 Evaluate the plan and adapt it to your needs Never forget that this is your diet plan, and that you are ultimately responsible for all aspects of it. That gives you the freedom to make any adaptations you deem suitable for your body.

PART 6: SUPPLEMENTS

At our site, we stress that the way to add muscle mass is through the partnership of a comprehensive training program and a proper whole-foods nutrition plan, and then use supplements to further encourage growth. No one ever put on muscle by sitting around and taking supplements, but plenty of bodybuilders have grown through training and whole-foods nutrition programs without the benefit of supplements. Still, with the right program, supplements can enhance your gains. Here’s a list of supplements we recommend as a starting point. Creatine Take a total of 3 to 5 g daily, either before or after training, or split the dosage between pre- and posttraining. Glutamine Take one to four doses of 5 g each per day. Take one dose right after training and work the others in during the rest of the day. Multivitamin/multimineral pack Make sure the pack you choose provides 100% of the Daily Value for at least 18 essential vitamins and minerals — including vitamins C, D, E and B complex, and the minerals chromium, manganese, s elenium and zinc. Calcium and magnesium are also very important, but they are rarely provided at 100% in a multi; so, in addition, take 1,000 milligrams (mg) of calcium in the morning and 400 mg magnesium before bed. Fiber Taking a fiber supplement in the morning or evening can help increase fiber intake. In addition to consuming plenty of vegetables and a piece or two of fruit per day, try supplementing with 5 g of fiber daily. Start at a lower amount and build up to this dosage.

Protein powder Rely on two different protein powders — one with little or no carbs, the other with a one-to-one ratio of simple carbs and protein (at least 30 g of protein per serving). Use the no- or low-carb product as a late-night meal and the one containing carbs immediately after training. Healthy oil Flaxseed and fish oil are high in crucial omega-3 fats. Take 3-5 g daily with food or protein shakes. Water our site recommends taking in at least a gallon of water a day, especially if you’re on a high-protein diet.

PART 7: TRAINING STRATEGIES

Why have we relegated training to a fairly minor portion of this superfeature? For two reasons: 1) In any mass-building program, training is a given, but gaining lean mass requires more emphasis on nutrition, and 2) our site magazine is replete with training features that have building mass as the objective.

If you are a hardgainer or someone who has had trouble adding muscle mass on a training program, you may have made the critical mistake of overtraining. If you are training more than four days a week and believe that you aren’t working hard enough, then the actual problem you’re encountering is most likely overtraining. Implementing a program using the training principles discussed here will help you overcome this.

1 Use basic movements as the core of your training Multijoint movements such as squats, deadlifts, bench presses and shoulder presses are more efficient at stimulating muscle growth.

2 Weight train four days a week Train more and you might be overtraining — not allowing your body enough time for full recovery, plus burning extra calories.

3 Train each bodypart only once per week Full-body movements already offer some inherent crossover, so targeting a bodypart more than once a week leads to overtraining.

4 Limit cardio As a rule of thumb for this program, limit cardio to three light (walking on a treadmill) half-hour sessions per week. If you are a hardgainer, you may have to avoid cardio altogether during this muscle-gaining phase. Bodybuilders who tend to hold more bodyfat may need to add a few minutes of cardio or perhaps increase the intensity of the half-hour sessions.

5 Thain no longer than an hour total When you are trying to add mass, don’t spend hours in the gym. Doing so only encourages you to burn more calories and overtrain.

PART 8: WHAT’S NEXT?

Congratulations! Whether you’ve chosen to follow the three- or six-month program, you’ll have added 10 pounds of lean mass in a short period of time. After that, reevaluate your physique goals. Our guess is that you’ll want to add another 10 pounds of muscle mass without dramatically increasing your bodyfat. Based on that, we have these bits of advice.

1 Remember that no single program will continue to give you gains forever This is another way of stating the our site mantra, “Everything works, but nothing works forever.” Your body will plateau at a new lean bodyweight, and you’ll have to seek out other strategies to jump-start growth.

2 Don’t restart the Big Plans program immediately after completing it Allow your body to adapt to its added mass. By doing this, you’ll help reset your body’s baseline at its new leaner-yet-heavier bodyweight. With time, your body will come to view this new improved bodyweight as its baseline size, and it will work to maintain that size rather than the smaller size you started from.

3 You can use the Big Plans program again to add 10 more pounds of lean muscle mass, but wait two or three months so that the program’s strategies will once again be unfamiliar to your body Above all, give yourself credit for your accomplishment. Adding 10 pounds of muscle mass is a difficult endeavor, and to do so in such a short period of time proves that you have earned the right to call yourself a serious bodybuilder.